Don’t look to the elites to step up. They’re all running for cover.
This article in the NY Times surveys the cowardly retreat overtaking American elites both public and private.
More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
It appears that not even ambition or opportunism is enough to make some powerful and important people risk opposing him.
Most elected Republicans are fully supportive of Mr. Trump and his agenda, and on issues like immigration some Democrats are moving in his direction, reflecting public opinion. Democrats were divided over the wisdom of the protest by Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, during Mr. Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night.
But the lack of aggressive pushback from targets of Mr. Trump’s retribution and policy agenda is striking if understandable in other cases.
University presidents are largely silent because they are protecting their institutions, said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education. “Don’t wrestle with a pig,” he said. “You’ll just get muddy and annoy the pig.”
Business leaders rarely criticize presidents of either party, and in any case they like Mr. Trump’s plans for tax cuts and deregulation, if not his tariffs. They also recognize, one of them said, that “periodically culling the work force is actually good for a healthy organization.”
But that business leader thinks that chief executives see the way that Mr. Musk is going about slashing the federal work force as “totally crazy” — but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.
Universities are supposed to be a bastion of free speech and free thought. Never mind. As for the business leaders, I would have thought they’d be concerned about their own bottom lines but apparently they are more afraid of Trump and Musk. What great stewards of private sector health they are.
President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order directing agencies to strip security clearances, government contracts and federal-building access from a top law firm with Democratic ties, Perkins Coie. It followed a similar, but more narrowly tailored, order late last month against attorneys at Covington & Burling representing former special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw the investigation and federal prosecutions of Trump.
“We have a lot of law firms that we’re going to be going after because they were very dishonest people,” Trump said in an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News.
The White House moves have sent a chill through the world of Big Law, at a time when litigation has emerged as one of the few checks on the president.
In private conversations, partners at some of the nation’s leading firms have expressed outrage at the president’s actions. What they haven’t been willing to do is say so publicly. Back-channel efforts to persuade major law firms to sign public statements criticizing Trump’s actions thus far have foundered, in part because of retaliation fears, people familiar with the matter said.
Golly, I seem to remember that during the campaign when Trump said he was going to get revenge on anyone who crossed him many of his allies and members of media were quick to point out that he had parroted once or twice that his revenge would be “success” so he didn’t mean it literally. Oh well. The rule of law was good while it lasted.
The NY Times reports that this fear among elected officials was about literal threats to themselves and their families who begged them not to put them in the cross hairs and also the fact that Elon Musk has said he will personally fund primaries against anyone who even thinks of crossing him has put the fear of God into most Republicans.
And then there’s this inspirational leadership:
Frankly,” Mr. Coons said, “it is a combination of hoping that things change and somehow this all comes apart and the chain-saw approach to government stops.”
A few very cool, savvy people went on the record saying that the whole thing is overblown and Trump isn’t doing anything that unusual. (I’ll have what they’re smoking.) And there are some naysayers, among them the alleged Great Democratic Billionaire Hope, Mark Cuban, who insist that the real problem is the “identity politics and all the wokeness as the real silencing factor.”
Yeah, that pronoun thing was a nightmare. Wokeness destroyed the economy and the world order, fired thousands of people and killed thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands around the world) with its “identity politics” just like Trump and Musk.
Levitsky, the democracy expert, had this silver lining:
The United States, he said, has a “wealthy and diverse opposition,” and rather than outright authoritarianism, there could be “a slow and gradual slide into a gray area.”
As he put it, “no democracy this old or this rich has ever broken down.”
I would never have believed that we’d vote a criminal imbecile like Trump into office even on a fluke much less restore him to the White House just four years later so maybe we are the first test case. And maybe we’ll get out of this without the country and world blowing up but that slow and gradual slide is well underway and I don’t know if enough of those in power, private or public, have the courage to ever do anything about it. Don’t count on them for anything.
And by the way, if we do manage to survive this crisis remember what they didn’t do and rebuild this country accordingly.
